It was a hot hot hazy day as the teams head out on the seagrass meadows of Chek Jawa.
A large contingent of TeamSeagrass are here not only for monitoring, but also field training with
Seagrass-Watch.
We had a warm piggie welcome at Chek Jawa by Young mama pig and her piglets!
We set up for training at House No. 1. Thankfully, with many hands, all the equipment is quickly sorted out.
Len McKenzie begins the session with a safety briefing. We are then soon sorted out into our groups and we're off for the seashore.
I did the far Site 2 and when we arrived, we did a quick refresh of the kinds of seagrasses we might find in this site. Boon Seng uses a T-shirt to make a really useful 'hat'.
It's fun to figure out seagrasses!
We then quickly set up for monitoring on Site 2.
Sadly, one of the transects on Site 2 has been 'eaten' up by the moving sand bar over the 6 years since we have monitoring on Chek Jawa. But zero is still data, so I did this rather boring transect. If the sand bar moves back to where it came from, hopefully the seagrasses will grow back and we will be there to record this!
Thanks to Johnson Ong, we get a glimpse of what happened at Site 1. Everyone is working hard!
Even when the tide came in and overwhelmed the last readings! Thanks to Jerome Pang for helping to take GPS readings of Site 1. As Pei Yan, Yifeng and I whacked in a missing stake at this site.
We really ended quite late today and had to walk back in high water.
Sadly, I noticed bleaching
Spoon seagrasses in several areas on Chek Jawa. Seagrasses lose their chlorophyll and turn transparent when they are stressed. Seagrass monitoring will hopefully help us understand such events.
At the end of the monitoring, I was very grateful to have many hands help wash and sort out the large amount of equipment.
Len and Rudi shared a few words of encouragement at the end of the session.
Len will provide a more detailed assessment of our effort tomorrow, when Level 2 training continues.
It was great to have so many enthusiastic seagrass folks on this trip: Gladys Chua, Heng Pei Yan, Jin Yifeng, Johannes Liew, Neo Mei Lin, Johnson Ong, Valerie Phang, Quek Boon Seng, Jonathan Tan, Wee Meilin, Sean Yap, April Gwee, Cheryl Koh, Aristotle Lau, Josephine Lee, Liu Yihui, Rebecca Loh, Jerome Pang, Simon Pulford, Sankar, Tok Yi Xin, Alisa Wee.
It was nice that friends from NParks could join us for the field training: Cheo Pei Rong, Ibrahim Shamsul, Desmond Lee, Kelvin Loy, Nhung Nguyen, Abrie Won,
Special thanks to Rachel Lim, Lim Wei Ling and Nor Aishah Mohd Rashid for coordinating this trip and taking care of the countless arrangements to make the trip possible.
Posts by others of this trip
- Johnson Ong shares lots of lively photos of the Team from start to finish.
- Jonathan Tan shares photos of wildlife seen during our monitoring trip.
- Ria with more about the people of Chek Jawa and Pulau Ubin
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